Deploy Rails on Heroku
Objectives
- Deploy a Rails app to a production server using Heroku
Deploying a Rails app (like all things in Rails) is simple and magical.
Postgres
Heroku uses Postgres, so you should too. Or if you don't you should set it to be the DB for use in production.
Anywhere in Gemfile
Prepare for deployment
Bundle
Once this is done you have to run bundle
which will automatically update the Gemfile.lock
, which must be done before you push to Heroku. Be sure to commit your changes before pushing.
Pushing to Heroku
If you haven't already, download the Heroku toolbelt, which is a commandline tool used to interact with your heroku instance.
Create a heroku app
First you need to create a heroku app (if you haven't already). This can be done in the command line inside your project directory.
heroku create YOUR_APP_NAME_HERE
You can test that this worked by running git remote -v
and you should see a new remote for heroku. If not try again (pay attention to any error messages).
Push it... p-p-p-push it real good
Once that is done we are ready to push our site to heroku. First, run git status
to make sure you've added and commited all changes then we just push to the newly added heroku remote.
git push heroku master
(this will take a while to complete)
Production Database Setup
You can run any command on heroku by using heroku run
followed by the command you want to execute. This will work for any command you'd normally run on your local development environment. This means that we can run rake db:migrate
on the server.
migrate the database
heroku run rake db:migrate
You can also run db:reset
or db:seed
if you need to reset your database.
WARNING Once you've deployed, don't edit with your migration files. You'll end up with different DBs on your local and production servers and it'll be very difficult to debug. Instead, you should be a well behaved developer and add new migrations for any DB changes.
Configure environment variables
If your app depends on any environment variables (if you have a .env
file) you'll need to set those values on Heroku.
To see the currently set environment values run
heroku config
To set a value run
heroku config:set TACO_KEY=xxxxxxx
Viewing your site
Once the push finishes you can go to your website. If you run heroku open
it will automatically load your web browser at the appropriate URL.
Updating
Once everything is set up all you have to do is run git push heroku master
to push new changes to Heroku (always make sure your changes are commited with git status
).
Troubleshooting
What if something goes wrong?
From your project directory you can run heroku logs
to see the rails console output on heroku or heroku logs --tail
to see a live feed.
You can also type herkou run rails c
to access the rails console on the production server.